Computer applications used in large-scale networks are evolving from a monolithic architecture that provides applications for use by many users (e.g., web applications) to a microservice architecture that features many small components. This allows applications to be easily scaled by providing new or updated components without requiring rewrite or modification of the entire application. However, as the number of components or services in an application increases, the management overhead regarding fixing problems and integrating changes in the overall applications greatly increases, as well. For example, modern microservice applications may have on the order of hundreds to thousands of individual components, and managing the bug-fixes, updates, and versions of these components impose substantial time and resource drain on the development and quality assurance (QA) departments of software developers.
During the development of application software, developers and programmers fix bugs and QA engineers verify the fixes, often rejecting or opening more bugs. This can be a highly iterative process with multiple versions created by the developers until the software quality is satisfactory. In complex applications, a fix applied by a developer may need to be performed and applied to multiple components of the system, requiring the QA engineer and developer to manually configure and replace multiple parts of the system in order to reproduce issues and verify fixes. Such components may be routines, subroutines, functions, modules, libraries, and other similar parts of the application program. This fix process often requires manually replacing components or sometimes installing of a complete revised version of the program. Not only is this process time consuming, but it is also error prone in that it creates scenarios where bugs are not reproduced by developers, or the configuration verified by the QA is not the correct one.
What is needed, therefore, is a method of overcoming the error prone and slow method of present application software development processes with respect to the developer and quality assurance interaction.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.